half the nights he slept curled against her, because sometimes she could take Benadryl and doze off with an arm draped over her but not without one.
Tim’s parents took care of the funeral arrangements, and Andy brought Evvie. He had her charcoal gray wool dress cleaned, drove her to the church, and held her up again as she received mourners. Mourners who, like him, didn’t know she had been packing the car when the hospital called. Every five or ten minutes, he’d lean down by her ear and say, “You’re okay.” And whenever he did, a fresh jolt of pain went through her. She could have sworn that every time, her heart pumped acid straight to the tips of her fingers. This was the first time the words seemed to bounce around inside her skull: Monster, monster.
He brought Evvie back home, and she went straight to bed. She mostly cried and slept and poked at bowls of soup and pieces of toast that he carried upstairs on a tray. After a while, he got her to watch a couple of movies with him—nothing too silly, nothing too sad, nothing with car accidents in it. “I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I’m so sorry, Ev. How can I help you?” And she’d pull the blankets back over her head. After a few days, she came downstairs to eat, and after a few more, they started talking about when she’d be ready to be by herself.
When he reemerged, she knew people asked about her everywhere he went, because he would pass her their best wishes. And she knew how they praised him even when he didn’t tell her, because she’d overheard it more than once: “You’re so good to her.” “She’s so lucky to have you.” “I don’t know what that girl would do without you, Andrew.” This still happened, from time to time, even with people who regularly saw Evvie herself. They wanted Andy to say how she really was. They wanted him to translate her reticence and explain her absences from places they expected her to be.
“You were leaving him,” he repeated. “So all that time afterward…it wasn’t because you missed him. Or was it?”
Evvie shook her head. “I had no idea what to do.”
“Evvie, did…did he hurt you? Were you scared of him?”
Does dreading every conversation with him count? Does tensing up when he came into the room count? “No,” she said. “I had told him I wouldn’t talk about the marriage stuff with you. And I didn’t know for sure that I was going to go until I did it, and…I didn’t say anything. I was going to call you.”
He nodded. “You were going to leave town,” he said. It was not a question. He would know she couldn’t have been planning to leave Tim and stay in Calcasset. She had to have intended to go farther away than that.
“Yes,” she said.
“You weren’t going to say goodbye to me, or your dad…my girls.”
“No, I wasn’t.” She almost explained that she was leaving notes for them, but it seemed like it would make it worse.
“Evvie…I would have helped, I would have helped you find somewhere to live. I would have taken you anywhere.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t say anything to anybody.”
He never raised his voice, not the whole time. “You were the first person I told that I was getting a divorce. I told you before I told my own mother. I can’t believe I had no idea.”
She was sure Andy was watching a slideshow in his head of those days bringing food to her bedroom upstairs, and of himself at Tim’s funeral leaning down by her ear, and of the two of them at the tree-planting ceremony, and she knew he was changing the captions on all those pictures. He’d told her over and over that he understood everything she thought was strange, wrong, bad, ill-suited to the circumstances. The loss explained all of it, he thought. The grief did. But now he had to take all those pictures out again, and it felt inevitable to her that as he searched for new tags to place on them, sooner or later he’d get to Here is a picture of her lying. “I didn’t want to answer questions about it,” she said. “I thought everyone would blame me.”
“You thought I would blame you?” He didn’t have to tell her how unfair it was or that he’d never given her reason to think anything like that. He was